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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: empire

Fulfilling Its Terrible Destiny

11 Sat Feb 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Anita Inder Singh, Anjuman-e Ulama-e Bihar, Asghar Sodai, Ayesha Jalal, BR Ambedkar, Britain, Caliphate, Creating a New Medina, Deoband, empire, INC, India, Indian National Congress, Islam, Jamiatul Ulama-e-Hind, Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam, Khilafat Movement, KM Ashraf, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Mohammad Sharif Toosy, Mohandas Gandhi, Muslim League, muttahida qaumiyat, NAP, National Agriculturalist Party, nationalism, Pakistan, United Provinces, Uttar Pradesh, Venkat Dhulipala

creating-a-new-medinaDhulipala, Venkat. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 544 pp.

By most accounts, Pakistan is a failed state: its inability to sustain a democratic process, oppressive treatment of minorities, regressive religious laws, and its developmental shortcomings certainly indicate a state that is not in congruence with modern – Western? – sensibilities. The prevailing consensus is that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan project was hijacked soon after the Islamic state was cut out of British India and marked a sharp turning point in the trajectory and fortunes of the fledgling country. Venkat Dhulipala’s explosive book, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India throws the proverbial wrench into that hypothesis, arguing instead that much of what has been perceived to be flaws in Pakistan’s national fabric is actually so by design and not accident.

For so complicated and debated an issue as Partition, Dhulipala presents an admirably succinct and comprehensive survey of the literature. One school of thought, led by Ayesha Jalal, argues that Jinnah used the demand for Pakistan as a bargaining chip to secure parity for Muslims in a unified India. According to Jalal, the crotchety leadership of the Indian National Congress bears the brunt of the responsibility – blame? – for the creation of the Islamic state. She reaches this conclusion by surmising from the vagueness of the Idea of Pakistan that it could not have been a serious proposition. The counter to this comes from Anita Inder Singh, who, although agreeing with Jalal that the Pakistani project was ill-defined, insisted that Jinnah did nonetheless want a separate country. In both these tellings, there was room to imagine Pakistan as a secular and modern republic like Turkey in Jinnah’s dreams that were soon hijacked by religious elements.

Even bottom-up histories, despite their foci on peasants, the ulema, Punjabis, Bengalis, or the victims of the Partition violence, rhyme with the Great Man histories of Jalal et al. in that they all cast doubt on existence of any clear idea of Pakistan notwithstanding the mass support for it. Fashionably, they even question the concept of nationalism. Regardless, the inability of academics to reify the sentiment has scarcely reduced its power. It is this confusion, some argue, that has resulted in the turmoil we see in Pakistani national life.

Dhulipala, however, begs to differ. The idea of Pakistan was crystallised in the public debates of Uttar Pradesh as a sovereign Islamic state that could not only provide succour for India’s Muslims but was also a worthy successor to the Caliphate that had just died in the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Istanbul in 1924. The new state of Pakistan would be an Islamic utopia and the protector of Muslims all over the world. The author has found support for this revolutionary thesis in archives in London, Delhi, Lucknow, even an occasional one in the United States, as well as oral histories, newspaper archives, and published primary sources in Urdu and in English. Dhulipala discovers that the Pakistani project traversed on two parallel tracks: while the Muslim League propounded statehood and all that it entailed – an army, infrastructure, currency, natural resources, human population – the Islamic soul and the spirit of the new country was popularised by the ulema. There was, also, occasional intersection between the two groups. Dhulipala shows that both groups shared a common political vocabulary, and, more importantly, the demand for a separate state based on religion cannot suddenly become a secular quest.

Some scholars have put the divergence between Hindus and Muslims as early as the writings of Syed Ahmad Khan in the late 19th century. Others have delayed this separation until the Nehru Report of 1928, after which Muslim participation in the national struggle for independence was somewhat muted. While tensions certainly simmered even earlier, the Government of India Act of 1935 became the battleground around which separate religious identities would coalesce. The British aim to sow divisions in the Indian nationalist movement and string along its empire with promises of independence was only partially successful – it divided the Indians but Britain still could not hold on to its colonial possessions.

Dhulipala warns his readers that communalisation was not inevitable even after 1935. Parties such as the National Agriculturalist Party wove a coalition of Hindu and Muslim landlords, exhibiting class solidarity, and Muslims in the Indian National Congress such as KM Ashraf argued that there was no Muslim culture in India per se and that the great majority of the community originated from Hindu stock. The ulema had not yet taken a position in support of the Muslim League and this aided the Congress who had some ulema arguing for a unified India. It is undeniable, however, that the fortunes of a moribund League were revived only by the clergy concerned that Muslims interests were been quashed in the conflict between the Congress-leaning Jamiatul Ulama-e-Hind and the Muslim League.

Although traditional historiography plays up the nationalist credentials of the Muslim clerics, there was a small but vocal and influential section of Deobandi ulema who backed the Muslim League and vociferously propagated the idea of Pakistan. Two of the more prominent ulema in this camp were Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, the chief of the Deobandi madrasa, and his mentor, Ashraf Ali Thanawi. In fact, the title of Dhulipala’s book comes from a speech given by Usmani: the alim describes how Mohammad left Mecca due to opposition to his beliefs and went to Medina to create a new Islamic state and compares the event to the creation of Pakistan which would be only the second Islamic state in history. The future state was thus imagined to the masses in powerful Islamic imagery.

Dhulipala does not disagree with his historian colleagues that there was a fair amount of Muslim support for muttahida qaumiyat (united nationalism), particularly from Husain Ahmad Madani, head of the JUH, and Syed Sajjad, chief of the Anjuman-e Ulama-e Bihar. It was felt that the partition of the subcontinent would divide and disadvantage the community and hinder tabligh, the proselytisation of Islam among the kaafir. This argument, however, could not carry the day.

As has come to be expected of any book on nationalism since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Dhulipala discusses the Urdu press and its influence in spreading the idea of Pakistan. Many of these newspapers, though produced locally, enjoyed a pan-Indian readership. The power of the press, we are reminded, can be only seen from the way Indian Muslims were mobilised during the Khilafat Movement in 1919 to protest the British treatment of the defeated Ottoman Caliph. Creating a New Medina is peppered with tussles between Muslims for and against the creation of Pakistan carried out in the subcontinent’s Urdu newspapers.

One of the other myths Dhulipala punctures is that of a secular Jinnah. Undoubtedly a non-observing Muslim, Jinnah was nonetheless brazen about using Islamic rhetoric. His hesitation to open up the membership of the Muslim League to non-Muslims, his casual suggestion of population transfers between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan all point to a tactical use of Islam and the ulema for his goals but also to someone who was culturally inclined towards an Islamic identity. Dhulipala quotes a contemporary historian of Islam, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who argues that a man is deemed Buddhist not because he is an exemplar of Buddha’s teachings but by his undertaking to try – Jinnah, and Pakistan, were both Muslim because they had undertaken to be so.

It is not true that Jinnah was unclear about what he wanted in a new state. In fact, in response to allegations that he is using the demand for Muslim statehood as a bargaining chip, Jinnah repeatedly states that he was not for an Indian federation. In fact, he suggests that Congress leaders read BR Ambedkar’s massive tome, Thoughts on Pakistan, that had come out within four months of the Lahore Resolution of March 1940. Interestingly, Mohandas Gandhi also recommended Ambedkar’s book. Jinnah also wrote the foreword for a two-volume compendium of articles by a Punjabi journalist, Mohammad Sharif Toosy, which made a powerful case for Partition.

Dhulipala argues that his work pushes against the countervailing understanding of the creation of Pakistan and he begins his review of the literature rather late in 1985 with Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Partition. The question arises, what was the consensus before 1985 that Jalal was arguing against? Is Dhulipala reviving old historiography, perhaps with much better data, or is his work genuinely new?

Second, was the debate between clerics like Madani and Sajjad arguing for unity and Thanawi and Usmani advocating Partition merely a matter of scholarship? What swayed the masses of the United Provinces, who had been so divided until the mid-1930s, to come down in favour of Usmani’s Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam? Even a cursory glance at modern politics rubbishes any belief that scholarship is what carries the day with the electorate.

Creating a New Medina is not an easy book for the lay reader. Its 500 pages are densely packed with names and relations that only a professional historian of the era can keep apart. In that sense, it closely reflects Dhulipala’s 2008 dissertation – a scholarly work meant more for the well versed. However, even casual readers broadly aware of the history of Partition and the Indian freedom struggle in the North can still gain much from this work which brings to the foreground some undercurrents that went into the creation of Pakistan that better explain today’s events than other theories. For example, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani reminds us in his book, India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends, that it was not Zia ul Haq who infused Islam into Pakistan’s politics but that it has been there from the very beginning. Asghar Sodai’s slogan from 1944, پاکستان کا مطلب کیا لاالہ الا اللہ (Pakistan ka matlab kya, la ilaha illallah), supports this thesis and Creating a New Medina has several other such examples. Seen from this perspective, Pakistan is not a failed state but merely fulfilling its terrible destiny.

Dhulipala’s book also poses a serious challenge to the way history has been taught in India. While a small sectional elite have tried to ramrod a narrative of religious pluralism at the moment of independence, research now suggests that Indians were far more concerned with their religious identity. The official story, which was Congress policy towards the Muslim League since the mid-1930s, has been re-emphasised post independence to cover up for its abject failure in controlling the fissure between Hindus and Muslims in India. The divergence was inevitable – even desirable – according to some, but Dhulipala’s work shows that there was still a chance to save the subcontinent until the early-1940s. To accept this raises questions about the sagacity of the leaders of the Congress party at a critical juncture in Indian history.

Creating a New Medina serves as a useful guide in looking not only at domestic politics and communalisation of the Indian electorate but also for foreign policy analysts who study Pakistan and its relations with India. That this Sick Man of Asia is replete with inconsistencies – as the secession of East Pakistan and the rejection of minority Muslim groups shows – cannot be taken as a sign that the country was, as Philip Oldenburg argued, insufficiently imagined. Even the most cohesive of nations have some ambiguity in their national narratives; that has not yet stopped people in believing in them.

Dhulipala has produced a thought-provoking book that deserves a considered response. As he himself admits, there are still gaps in his narrative that need to be, sources permitting, filled. One obvious tangent is the role and political beliefs of Muslims outside the northern heartland. Another is the socio-economic condition of those who voted to stay in India and those who chose to leave: did all who migrated do it out of a sense of religious necessity or were there, as in the journey to the New World, many who just sought a fresh start? As any good book does, Creating a New Medina shakes us out of our historical complacence and leaves us with further questions to ponder.

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The Greatest Empire of Them All

19 Tue May 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

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Abbasid, Achaemenid, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Chalukya, Chola, culture, economy, empire, Gupta, Khmer, Kush, literature, Maurya, military, philosophy, Rome, Satavahana, science, Sumeria, technology, territory, Venice

Who was the greatest empire of them all? Ask a dozen people that question and you will get a baker’s dozen answers! Of course, everyone has their favourites and it is hard to accept that there were any shortcomings in our precious darlings but how does one go about bringing even a semblance of objectivity to the discussion? What are the criteria by which one might evaluate empires?

Almost every discussion on this topic starts with a comparison of military might. “Rome dominated the world,” someone would say. “Surely, the irresistible onslaught of the Mongol horde is something to be feared,” someone else would counter. “Agincourt!” blurts out the incorrigible Anglophile. “Waterloo,” they grin further as the Italo-Gallics imperceptibly roll their eyes at those “northerners” who did not even learn to take a bath daily until well into the 19th century. “But what about Alexander the Great?” squeaks the lonely classicist.

Two things immediately stand out in this conversation: first, this is still a largely Western conversation without any serious inclusions of Eastern empires. One wonders if the Mongols would have made the list had they not invaded Poland and threatened Central Europe. Second, what exactly is an empire? Is it defined merely by size or does it consider the nature of the political, social, and economic relationship between the conquerors and the conquered? Before I kill all the fun in this exercise, I will just state that the way the ancients understood empire was through political fealty and allegiance: weaker kings and chiefs would swear oaths of loyalty to an emperor and send annual tributes in exchange for their continued local rule. This worked well for the emperor too in an era where difficulty in communications and travel meant that authority and distance from the imperial capital were inversely related.

Does the size of an empire contribute to its greatness? If so, the British were the greatest empire ever. This same yardstick would also knock Rome out of the Top 25 and cede greater importance to Brazil than to the Achaemenid, Mauryan, or Mughal empires. Clearly, territory is important but not all-important; after all, one hardly refers to Israel as an empire for its dominion over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By the same token, population, economic wealth, and raw military power are complicated indicators because later empires will always have an advantage with regard to these features. Even comparing contemporarily, there was hardly any technological difference between the Romans and the Greeks at Asculum or between the French and the Austrians at Austerlitz. While these indicators do matter in a broad sense, they are of little use when differentiating among an already elite group of empires.

Related to size is duration. How great is an empire, really, if it collapses even before the ashes of its creator have cooled? Alexander the Great comes to mind here, for he shaped an empire in 13 years that did not last as many months after he was gone. However, in that short yet intense period, Alexander did as much to spread Greek influence around the known world as the many great kings and philosophers before him. How can an empire leave its mark on history if it lasts but for a fleeting moment? If duration is the primary criterion, Rome would undoubtedly reign as the primus inter pares of empires – even though considered an empire only after the fall of the republic in 27 BCE, Rome was among the mightiest powers around the Mediterranean since the 3rd century BCE. From this early date, it lived on in some form or another, until the collapse of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 – almost 1,700 years. Yet survivability is also an imperfect measure – who remembers the Kush in eastern Africa that lasted for nearly 1,400 years? Or how seriously are the Venetian and Holy Roman Empires taken, both of which lasted about a thousand years?

Surely culture must have a role to play in how empires are remembered and evaluated? After conceding the approximate criteria of size and duration, does culture offer a better yardstick by which to measure empires? This is a complicated question, for it immediately raises the question of who does the remembering. There is no doubt that the more popular Romans and Abbasids built great empires but in what cultural way do the Cholas or the Guptas fail to measure up to them? Memory depends on where one stands; for Europe, Greece was the cradle of civilisation but to people further east in Sumeria, Iran, and India, Homer and Aristotle were relatively late to the game. Should we judge an empire by how much cultural influence it wielded in its own time or should the measure be how much of it trickled down to the present? Do Rome and Greece not have an unfair advantage in that their influence was carried forth since the 1500s by the bayonets of those who wished to claim their lineage than by the merits of their own empires? In other words, had India colonised Europe in the 1500s, would the referent empires not have been the Harappans, Guptas, and Cholas? How much sense does it make to tear these cultures out of their historical context and evaluate them clinically for their contributions to humanity?

There is also the problem of making sense of the contributions each civilisation made to human knowledge. If utility is considered, we run into problems with Indian science which offered remarkable explanations of the natural world but did not always translate into technology. The same could be said of the metaphysics of Aristotle by a modern atheist. Another consideration, veracity, is of little help either. Modern states and empires will always have an advantage over older ones because the nature of discovery and invention is such that it builds on earlier work. A millennium down the road, our descendants might consider our lifetimes a total waste because so many of our theories might have been disproved by then. Influence is perhaps a better measurement, however imprecise: Parmenides and Aristotle laid down the framework in the West of how science and philosophy ought to be done. Many of their theories were not challenged until the 1500s, some even as late as the 1800s. The Greek plays are still used as metaphor to capture complex human emotions and characteristics in an easily understandable way. Similarly, the power of Sanskrit and its literature over Indian writing was enormous until the Raj systematically dismantled native systems in favour of creating brown Englishmen.

Given a threshold military capability and size, an empire, then, is made great by its science, philosophy, and culture. Monuments are usually good indications of an empire’s achievements for they at once represent wealth, administrative acumen, and technical and aesthetic brilliance. Neither Abu Simbel nor Ellora nor Angkor Wat could have been built by, to use a modern term, failed states. This also supports the idea that as a thinking species, humans find greater value in the higher pursuits than in crude physical strength. The greatest empire, then, is one that is closest to – forgive the borrowing of the atrocious phrase – “having it all.” With these criteria, who do you think is the greatest empire of them all?


This post first appeared on Swarajya on May 28, 2015.

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The Stuff of Empires

08 Tue May 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Europe, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

capitalism, China, Christianity, empire, Europe, ghost acreage, globalisation, history, ideology, imperialism, India, technology, Third World

For most of recorded history, the glorious empires and fantastic kingdoms existed outside of Europe. China, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, and Persia, cradles of civilization as it were, dominated the known world. The myths and legends of their riches and produce inspired many Europeans, from Alexander the Great and Marco Polo to the 21st century tourist, to visit these lands. However, most of these once splendid lands are today the bulk of the Third World. Why? What propelled Europe to the forefront and caused these former powers to recede? This is not a new question – it has troubled historians for a long time. Even during the height of imperialism, especially during the height of imperialism, much was written about what made Europe supreme. While this is too vast a topic to engage in with any detail on a blog, it would nonetheless be a fruitful venture to look at some recent scholarship on the topic and discuss some of the theories.

Daniel Headrick, author of The Tools of Empire, asserts what may probably be the most visible reason for Europe’s rise to power. He argues that empire required not just motives, but also the means to do so. Earlier, European conquests of non-Europe were at best temporary and haphazard. Local rulers soon displaced their European masters (e.g. Alexander) and Europe’s hegemonic grip was lost. Later, by the nineteenth century, European superiority in technologies of war gave European armies a decisive advantage over their local counterparts, usually at great cost to native armies in terms of lives. An example the author gives is of how English armies at the end of the eighteenth century, during the Mysore Wars with Tipu Sultan, could easily face armies six to seven times their size. By the time of the Maratha wars, however, that had reduced to twice their size, and by the Sikh wars in the middle of the nineteenth century, the armies were more or less equal. Indigenous people had absorbed European organizational skills and technology, and were rapidly catching up with European armies. At this point, however, Europe gained a decisive advantage not to be lost again, with the advent of picric acid, machine guns, and dumdum bullets. Headrick’s argument is that technology allowed non-Europeans to achieve parity with Europeans for a short time before they fell behind again. This should clearly demonstrate the role of technology over anything else. Ideology (e.g. Christianity), as in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and to a certain extent, the seventeenth centuries, were unable to achieve the same spectacular success of later years.

Headrick divides the “tools of empire” into three categories: the first is the steamship, which allowed the Europeans to explore greater parts of the globe and penetrate the coasts of Asia, Africa, and South America beyond the scant few miles they had been able to do so for a long time on foot. The second category is that of military technology: better guns, explosives, and organizational/topographical skills allowed Europeans to muster firepower where and when they wanted it in concentrated bursts to produce decisive victories. Europeans knew not only how to make faster loading rifles, machine guns, and stronger steel, but also understood the applications of cartography to war-making. The third category Headrick discusses is communications. As communications improved, with the laying of underwater cables, railways, and steamships, news traveled faster around the world, and with their advanced transportation, gave the British the ability to respond in weeks when it would have taken years. However, Headrick does not take into account entirely that all that he has mentioned falls into one larger category, namely, tools of conquest. Empire was far greater an exercise than the defeat of a few native armies. The ability to hold territory without constant use of force was also required. When even a relatively small mutiny (as in the case of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857) occurred, it broke the British East India Company and the Crown had to step in. Thus, knowledge, if not ideology, served a critical role to keep locals under control. Admittedly, the author admits that as means were made available, motives changed. However, perhaps the converse can also be argued – as motives changed, there was a greater impetus to make means available.

In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas furthers this idea that technology had a larger role to play in imperialism than it is usually given credit for. Unlike Headrick, Adas accepts that ideology may have been a motive for early European expeditions, to bring the “lost peoples of the world” into the fold of Christianity. However, this changes with time, and European discourse about themselves and their relation to the conquered peoples begins to focus on technology rather than ideology. Countering the argument by some scholars that race was also a crucial element in imperialist ideology, Adas explains that racism was not a factor in imperialism, but may have grown out of technological dominance. Adas cites thinkers like J.S. Mill and F.W. Farrar who argued that technological marvels were proof of British superiority and extrapolates from this that non-European inferiority was not necessarily seen as inherent. Here, Adas makes a masterful distinction between science and technology – Europeans could not explain the evidence for high science in ancient India, nor could they account for maritime charts the Indians and Chinese possessed that were initially superior to European charts. Thus, Europeans argued that rather than science, its useful application to serve human needs is evidence of superiority, for knowledge can be gained by patient observation but not everyone possessed the creative spark to harness that knowledge into something useful for humankind. In the application of knowledge, non-Europeans were obviously lacking. Furthermore, the acceptance by local elites that there was a need for their culture to “modernise” would seem to vindicate European views. Unfortunately, Adas does not take into account the new trends in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century that brought race into vogue. With Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Europe became more and more fascinated with race and purity. It is unlikely that this did not bleed into their thoughts on imperial thinking. Indeed, as other scholars have shown, most notably Thomas Trautmann in Aryans and British India, Europeans wove intricate myths of race that dominated their thinking. The best known example is the Aryan Invasion Theory, that of a master, Aryan race that was prevalent in India (and hence the sophistication on ancient Indian civilisation), whose purity was destroyed by mixing with the local Dravidians (and hence the decline). As Ann Stoler has convincingly argued in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, race became the yardstick by which imperial booty was distributed – as more and more natives learned European tongues, mastered Western technology, and converted to Christianity, it became harder for Europeans to justify their rule over their conquered subjects. Race proved to be the ultimate divider between East and West.

Another school of thought has looked at the implications of science and technology in other fields, primarily economics. It has been argued that European monetary systems and free trade were the motors of European domination. Simply put, Europe became richer, and hence could afford greater armies and spend more on research. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, discusses the impact of capitalism on imperialism. First of all, he makes a much-needed distinction between a capitalist world market and a capitalist mode of production – a capitalist world market, if taken to mean commodity exchange, could have been said to exist from the times of cavemen perhaps. The capitalist mode of production, however, was the essence of capitalism as we know it. Surplus extraction and homogenised and quantified labour (labour as commodity) were uniquely European, he argues, which propelled Europe to the forefront. This should not, the author makes clear, ignore the many non-European actors in the world market. Workers from all parts of the globe – forced labourers, independent merchants, entrepreneurs, mercenaries – all participated in world economy. The mercantile activity that was forced upon various regions expanded the scale of markets in size, consumption, productivity, and profit, but this disrupted traditional social relations in many parts of the world and brought together disparate social groups into the capitalist trade network. What is not focussed on entirely is how unequal relations between European traders and their local counterparts impacted imperialism – did this cause resistance, or were the locals co-opted into imperial discourse? In a way, the author argues that imperialism is therefore inherent in capitalism not a final stage of it as was argued by Lenin.

Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, a remarkable success even in the non-academic community, puts forward another argument about the economic underpinning of Great Power status. He attempts to show a distinct link between economics and strategy, and in the process, his argument begins to look like a mixture of modernisation theory and economic determinism. His main point, however, is that it is relative power that matters, not absolute. This would then open the door for an argument that the East did not necessarily decline, but the West rose faster than the empires of Asia and Africa. Furthermore, Kennedy argues that a fine balance is required in expending resources on economic development and building up a military. The West was better at achieving this than India or China, and hence, although vast riches were found in India, the Indian princely states were relatively easy to coax out of their wealth. The weight of the argument here for Europe’s rise is obviously carried by a realist, economic-military materialism that does not take into account the tremendous impact of the organisational abilities of the nation-state or the seduction of ideology.

In perhaps the latest trend in the historiography of the question of Europe’s rise, Kenneth Pomerantz’s The Great Divergence offers a radically different view from the above authors. With more information on the East, particularly China, Pomerantz attacks the notion that the East, by the 16th century, had stagnated economically or socially. Pomerantz strongly asserts that in fact, in many areas, Asia was ahead of Europe. China for example, produced more iron that England did at the height of the industrial revolution. In many other criteria for “advanced” civilisation such as birth-rates, infant mortality, variety of goods in the market, and calorie intake, Pomerantz demonstrates that Asia was equal to if not ahead of Europe. In perhaps the greatest divergence from historiography, Pomerantz plays down the role of coal in Europe’s rise to hegemony. The traditional argument has been that land was scarce in England, and trade and colonies in the New World, ghost acreage, alleviated some of the pressures on land use. Pomerantz counters this, by arguing that land was not at all scarce in China, and therefore, China had access to resources without the need for colonies.

Pomerantz’s greatest failure is that in his obsession to show economic parity, he has ignored political and social institutions such as the nation-state, universities, and multi-national money-lending institutions. He is content to argue that it was serendipity that Europe discovered the New World and the resources acquired from there propelled Europe ahead of Asia. Due to China’s sudden decision to use silver as currency instead of paper, large sums of money were wasted in monetisation of the Chinese market when they could have been used on other value-added commodities. Unfortunately, Pomerantz ignores the multiplying effects of these events, and in turn, his argument is unaware of the slow progress of European technology until the 1800s when Europe suddenly seems to spurt ahead.

The question of Europe’s rise to world domination is truly complicated, and it is unfair to be overly harsh on any of the above excellent authors. Imperialism in itself is a difficult concept to precisely define, let alone the relative rise and fall of imperialism in different parts of the globe. Additionally, it is silly to try and explain an event as complicated as Europe’s rise, an event that has taken place over centuries, monocausally. Thus, all these authors have their place in historiography. However, it seems that although technology played a large part in creating empire (it is difficult to separate Europe’s rise and imperialism given the numerous and strong connections between them), it had less to do with retaining it. Ideology has much to do with imperial control, ambitions, and demise, as nationalism has proven over the last century. The impact of using technology as an ideology (the discourse of technology rather than actual technology) has perhaps had a greater effect on natives than the threat of bigger guns. Discourses of lack, decay, and failure continue to have effect long after the scars of the millions of deaths due to famine, epidemics, and bloodshed caused by imperialism have healed.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty states in Provincializing Europe, it is exceedingly difficult to talk outside of a European framework in studying non-European history. Europe is a hyperreal entity that dominates our discussions, and it is hard to not fall into the trap of thinking, “first in Europe, then elsewhere.” This is the lasting legacy of Europe’s rise – its ability to dominate discourse long after its military power has waned. Europe’s rise owes much, to be Gramscian, to its ability to control the site around which conflict rages, thereby giving it hegemony. This is the reason ideology seems to be the cement that holds technology and economics together.

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